"That's my little girl"

Jan Jurkus, iPad out, is scrolling past photos of her daughter Barb Honchak’s latest Mixed Martial Arts fight when one of them brings her up short.

It’s a startling shot, a supremely chiseled Honchak's right forearm is delivering a crashing blow to Vanessa Porto’s face, and Honchak, her own face bloodied, eyeing the hit with ferocious concentration.

“Look at that face,” Jurkus says. “That’s my little girl!”

Honchak, seated next to her on the living room couch, laughs.

“It’s not something you would ever hope your daughter would grow up to do, I’ll guarantee you that!” Jurkus adds.

Honchak went on to defeat Porto, an eight-year veteran from Brazil, which gave her the world flyweight title in the Invicta Fighting Championships. The fight was held April 5 at the Ameristar Casino in Kansas City.

It was the first fight in Invicta’s newly-formed 125-pound flyweight division. It was also Honchak’s third fight in the three-fight contract she had signed with Invicta; now she will need to renegotiate with them so she can fight again, most likely next fall.

The Porto fight was shown online, at Invictafc.com, for $9.95. Invicta hopes to televise future bouts, and their hope is that some will wind up in syndication.

In a sport with as much raw aggression as mixed martial arts, what attraction is there for a 5’4’’ woman?

Nothing about her upbringing in Edwardsville seems to presage a career in fighting.

Certainly Honchak was active.

She loved horseback riding. She loved scuba diving and camping. In college, she entered bike races and running events, and she was into mountain biking and snowboarding.

She grew up on East Lake Drive, near Dunlap Lake, with parents who were passionate scuba divers. They managed to instill that love into her and her sister, Tammy. The house had a pool and Jan recalls that her husband, who got his diving certification in Hawaii, sometimes donned scuba gear and descended to clean up the bottom.

By age 12 the sisters had earned their diving certificates.

“If you’re that kind of person, it’s just a phenomenal, beautiful sport. It's very cool,” says Jurkus, who is an RNFA - a Registered Nurse First Assistant - at Gateway Medical Center, in Granite City.

Honchak attended St. Mary’s School, then went to Leclaire, Edwardsville Middle School and finally to Edwardsville High School, where she graduated in 1997. While working at a dive shop in the area, she met her husband-to-be, Tim. Later Honchak earned an associates degree from Lewis & Clark Community College, and Tim graduated from SIUE with a degree in biology.

For the next decade the couple lived away from Edwardsville. While at Arizona State University, Honchak earned a bachelor’s degree in molecular cellular biology. When they moved to Flagstaff, she earned a master’s degree in ecology and genetics.

On their return, they began living in High Ridge, Mo. Barb worked at a lab in Washington University, studying photosynthesis. Tim, who went on to earn a master’s degree in nursing, began taking Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes at Steve Berger’s Fit or Fight gym in Valley Park. One day when he was injured, he asked Berger if Barb could step in and finish his classes.

“I’d never been in a fight in my life, so I was kind of curious if I could,” Honchak says. “I kind of took it as a ‘Why not?’ But I was terrified.”

After she’d had six months of training, a promoter asked Berger if Honchak was interested in participating in an amateur fight. It was a week before her wedding, but Honchak said yes. And she told no one.

“I got poked in the eye by the girl in the first round and I had this big red mark,” Honchak said. She was able to fend off her mom’s questions about it until after the wedding. Jurkus says she’ll always remember the moment.

“We were just walking down the street and she told me about it, and I just cried,” she said. “I was like ‘What did I do to make you want to get in a cage and get beat up?' It was just horrible.”

Soon Tim was offered a job as a nurse anesthetist at OSF St. Mary Medical Centre, in Galesburg. By the end of 2011, Barb had quit the Washington University job and they had moved up to Quad Cities. She began training at a neighborhood gym in Bettendorf under legendary MMA trainer Pat Miletich.

MMA is a full-contact sport that allows for striking and grappling. Any form of martial arts can be utilized though the most common are boxing, wrestling, judo, karate, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, muay thai and Dutch thai. Traditionally it has been the province of men but on a very limited basis female professional MMA has been around as long as the men’s. Honchak says women are still a decade or so behind the men.

Media coverage has always lagged for the women.

A few female MMA competitions were documented in Japan in the 1990s, but for several years after that in the U.S. there was almost no mainstream media coverage for women. In the 2000s, it garnered some media coverage when organizations such as Strikeforce and Shark Fights invited women to compete. One of the first major female MMA fights took place in San Jose in 2006. But in recent years, female MMA fighting has begun to catch on.

By February of 2012, Honchak had had nine amateur fights and seven pro fights. Despite the fact that he had retired two years earlier, Miletich decided to continue to help Honchak train.

“I’d like to help every fighter,” said Miletich in an April 2013 interview for sportsillustrated.com, “but the ones that I see that are extremely dedicated or working so hard that it’s impossible to ignore them, those are the ones that you just have to help. Barb’s one of those fighters.”

Honchak acknowledges that early in her career she was terrified to enter the cage. She has managed to overcome that, and today all that’s left is nerves. And anxiety. Her fear of being hurt is gone. The only real fear now is that she gives a poor performance and lets people down who have helped her get where she is today. The goal now is to represent her gym well, represent her trainers and coaches well, she says. “You become like family with these people,” she says. “It’s blood, sweat and tears. It really is. I’ve bled on them, sweated on them, and I’ve cried on them.”

Today Jan Jurkus goes to all her daughter’s fights. On April 5, she showed up to Ameristar Casino and began taking pictures before the Porto fight, the way mothers do. With her was her other daughter, Tammy Bauer. A few years ago, Bauer quit a promising career with Master Card to open a Tai Kwon Do school in Hamel known as Blue Wave of Madison County. She offers fitness boot camps and teaches Tai Kwon Do to adults and children.

It was Honchak who, before she had begun training for MMA, encouraged her sister to get back into shape by agreeing to return to race with her in an MS 150 bike race. Tammy was able to finish, and since then she has participated in a half triathlon.

Before the Porto fight, Jurkus walked the runway with her camera, jostling for the best photo spot. When a spectator found out she was Honchak’s mom, he let her sit ring side for the bout.

“When she came out she was waving at me,” Jurkus recalled with pride. “The whole time she was fighting I was like biting both fists.”

As he does with all of her fights, Tim stayed in her corner throughout. The rules were modified to allow for five five-minute rounds, two rounds more than usual. That was nerve-racking, Jurkus says.

Porto, of Sao Paulo, is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. But the match turned out to be primarily a striking battle with Honchak winning a unanimous decision to become the first Invicta FC flyweight champion in history.

Honchak was in the dressing room afterward when a security guard approached to say that there was a man waiting at the back door carrying a bag of t-shirts. Honchak discovered it was Patrick Ahrens, whom Honchak hadn’t seen since they graduated from EHS.

Ahrens owns a printing shop in the area and he had printed up several shirts of her for the fight.

Though she is 33, Honchak has no plans to quit fighting professionally any time soon. She’s had minor cuts and bruises, of course, but has managed to steer clear of serious injuries. When it comes down to it, MMA fighting is an art, she says, and MMA fighters are artists. “I think most painters don’t feel their painting is ever finished,” she said. “That’s how you feel with martial arts. I have a world title, but I still look at myself as very amateur. I still have a lot to learn, and there are so many arts. There is always something to learn, always something to try.”